The advent of cloud computing has led to many new lifecycle management methods for applications deployed using cloud computing infrastructures. These new lifecycle management methods drastically reduce the time required to build and update applications. This reduction in time required to build and update applications has led to increased organizational agility and a reduction in cost.
However, the ability to migrate workloads from these new lifecycle management methods to traditional lifecycle management methods and between new lifecycle management methods is limited. This ability to quickly choose the lifecycle management method appropriate for the computing model is critical to maintaining flexibility. Flexibility is strategic to information technology (IT) organizations for several reasons including compliance and deployment restrictions.